As I sit here in my office, I'm surrounded by teetering stacks of
overstuffed file folders, yellowed clippings from old technical journals,
dusty old electronics parts, and circuit boards of every description.

These are my treasures.

My inability to throw away software is every bit as bad. Right here in my
office, you can find software on old Travan tapes and 5 1/4 inch floppies. I
even have a few cassette tapes, 8-inch floppy disks, and a stack of punch
cards containing software I wrote sometime around 1972.

These, too, are my treasures.

So, why am I making all these confessions? Because my inability to throw
things away is why this page exists. Let me explain:

Walking into my office a few days ago, I accidentally kicked an old
Fairchild Semiconductor MAN-2A 5-by-7 dot-matrix LED display across my
office floor. These little devices were pretty cool back in their day (in
the 1970's). They're little blocks of plastic with five columns of seven
LED's embedded in them. By lighting up these LED's in the proper
combination, you can form jagged, blocky-looking letters. Line up a handful
of these devices side-by-side, and you can spell out words or phrases. (I've
since discovered that Fairchild still
makes very similar
devices to this day.)

The first time I ever played with one of these dot-matrix displays was
around 25 years ago. I was taking an electronics class, and our lab
assignment was to wire up a circuit to display the letter "A" on one of
these displays. Since my lab partner was one of only two females in a class
of around 120 students, I decided to show off. I wired up several of these
displays to spell out a rather crude, sexually explicit request of my lab
partner.

Later that afternoon, much to my surprise and glee, she actually complied
with that request.

So naturally, I've been quite fond of dot-matrix displays ever since.

(Now, before my in-box overflows with hate mail accusing me of harassing
a classmate, let it be known that this particular girl had been shamelessly
flirting with me for weeks. Under the lab bench, her hand was actually on my
thigh as I wired up this circuit. What's a boy to do?)

Anyway, after reminiscing a while about this display I'd kicked across my
office floor, I sat down to continue redesigning my website. Then, an idea
popped into my head. Wouldn't it be cool to scroll a message across the home
page of my website using simulated dot-matrix displays? It would demonstrate
to potential employers that I can write JavaScript, and use SSI. It might
bring back fond memories for other aging geeks who remember these old
displays. Who knows, it might even impress the girls. (However, the message
to be scrolled would, of course, have to be much more polite than the one I
displayed for my frisky lab partner so many years ago.)

So, in order to create this display, I grabbed a dusty old circuit board
from my box of treasures and scanned it. (See! I knew there was a
reason I shouldn't throw away that board!) To jog my memory of which LED's
should be illuminated to form each letter of the alphabet, I pulled an old
Fairchild data sheet, copyright 1979, from my bookshelf. (See!
I knew that yellowed, old data sheet would come in handy someday!)
I then wrote a hunk of JavaScript to make it all scoot.

Here's the result (with a message specifically welcoming you):

Okay - so it didn't turn out quite as cool as I'd envisioned. As a matter
of fact, it looked so completely hideous and clunky on the home page of my
site that I decided not to use it.

But, no way am I going to throw it away! Remember, I'm a Geek Packrat.

(Curious Geeks may view the scroll.js
JavaScript file that makes it all go, along with the companion files
scrolla.js and
scroll.shtml, and the necessary
graphics files. Admit it - this code's just way
too pretty to throw away.)